Methodology
Methodology
Qualitative content analysis was used in this study to address how lifestyle fitness influencers create authenticity and parasocial relationships on TikTok and how their performances are construed and reacted to by the audience in the comment section. The qualitative content analysis was appropriate, as the project was not aimed at quantifying recurrent behaviors but at making sense of patterns of meaning, emotional coloring, and social interaction in naturalistic digital communication. Social media spaces tend to convey authenticity implicitly by using tone, humor, vulnerability, sharing routines, and conversation, so one needs to interpret them qualitatively to get the meanings that are not explicitly disclosed. Natural, unprompted interactions were to be examined. TikTok comment sections are where fans publicly respond to influencers' content, confirm authenticity claims, critique performances, and assert relational proximity in a naturally born manner. This is particularly important since the building of parasocial relationships is based on recurrent mediated exposure and perception by the audience as opposed to formal interaction. The study of these native interactions, hence, provides a better understanding of the co-construction of parasocial relationships between influencers and followers in the context of regular platform use.
The unit of analysis was the TikTok posts and their respective commentary of 12 lifestyle fitness influencers, which included: Demetra Dias, Izzy Samuel, Chelsea Collins, Ellie Maack, Patty, Poppi Louiz, Jessica Bickling, Whitney Simmons, Savannah Peasante, Kristina Girod, Sam Goatlifters, and Lily. Purposeful sampling was used to select influencers with the following criteria: the presence on TikTok must be active, the influencer should be posting content related to fitness or wellness at least three times a week, and the number of followers must be between 200,000 and 1 million or more followers. This range was selected so as to have creators with already existing audiences, but at the same time, gain diversity in branding approach, presentation, and audience appeal. Each influencer collected 17 posts over six weeks from January to March, which were based on four categories of recurring posts: workout or routine posts, daily-life or get-ready-with-me posts, vulnerable or personal storytelling posts, and sponsored posts. These clusters have been chosen since the existing literature demonstrates that the phenomenon of authenticity in influencer culture is often achieved via routine visibility, self-revealing, and instances of felt vulnerability (Reade, 2021). On each of the posts, the top 10 most active and contextually relevant comments were obtained in terms of level of engagement and relevance to the theme, which resulted in a dataset that reflected both influencer self-presentation and follower reaction.
The coding sheet has been formulated to answer the three research questions of the study directly. In the case of the research question What conversational patterns occur in follower comments in response to authenticity cues?, the most important variables of interest are recurring comment styles and follower responses. These were admiration, identification, praise, emotional encouragement, skepticism, humor, and direct reactions to the vulnerability of influencers. The ability to code these patterns allowed recognizing how the followers were regularly responding to specific authenticity cues by the creator and the type of post.
The important variables in the case of the research question "How do influencers and followers co-construct parasocial relationships through recurring interactional practices? were related to reciprocal communication and relational exchange. The codes of influencer behaviors were direct address, reply behavior, conversational tone, personal disclosure, and invitations to audience participation. The behaviors exhibited by followers comprised conversational responses, familiar language, repetition, and responses that regarded the influencer as a social object. These types were indicative of the way in which parasocial relationships are formed, not by a process of unilateral exposure only, but by habitual interaction.
The most important variables with respect to emotional tone and language signifying closeness or attachment were used in response to the research question: What forms of emotional expression or relational language are present in influencer -follower exchange? This encompassed coded manifestations of support, affection, encouragement, concern, gratitude, and relational phrases like references to inspiration, comfort, familiarity, or friendship. Special consideration was given to instances of emotional language use in both the follower reactions and the captions of the influencer in order to be able to examine the way the relational tone circulated in the exchange.
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